Security Appliances Category Profile

When looking at the historical baseline of Security Appliances satisfaction scores, solution providers are relatively content with the products of their vendors. Contentment, however, isn't necessarily a good thing.

In the 2006 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) study, solution providers dealing in security appliances—mostly boxes that bundle firewall, VPN, content filtering and antivirus—gave their vendor partners static scores in the areas of Product Innovation, Support and Partnership compared to the previous two years, at the aggregate level.

The only area where scores rose was in Loyalty, where the average jumped 7 points, from 71 in 2005 to 78 this year.

What would make solution providers happier is more innovation and a less parochial approach to developing and marketing their technology and services. In Product Innovation, solution providers rated compatibility and ease of integration the third-highest criterion.

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"With different vendors coming out with proprietary answers to security problems, it makes it more difficult to comply with one over the other," says Andrew Roper, director of data technologies at BCS Voice and Data Solutions in Virginia Beach, Va. "They need to be more open, especially with security. Security affects everyone; there needs to be more adherence to standards and compliance and more interoperability between vendors."

Analysts have long predicted that security consumers will migrate from best-of-breed point solutions to holistic, integrated systems. The reality is that many end users—midmarket and enterprises alike—boil security purchases down to price, which makes integrated, holistic offerings and standards-compliance components more important to solution providers.

In addition to compatibility, security-appliance dealers are most concerned with product quality/reliability, quality of technical support, managing channel conflict and ease of doing business with their vendor partners.

In Product Innovation, which includes the product quality/reliability criterion, SonicWall earned the highest score in the field of eight, with an 81.

Juniper, which posted the third-highest overall score (73), earned the third-highest score in technical innovation (75) and is pushing for more open standards and interoperability. CEO Scott Kriens says the networking and security vendor will publish more application-program interfaces, software-development kits and documentation to make Juniper's security and networking products easier to integrate with competing products.

"It really is a principle, a practice, of giving the customers what they want," Kriens says.

But in the Security Appliances arena, quality of technical support is another story. SonicWall, the ARC winner, placed only fourth in this criterion, with a score of 69.

SonicWall CEO Matt Medeiros and channel chief John DiLullo say they plan to make improving technical support and training SonicWall partners top priorities in the coming year.

Symantec didn't fare very well in quality of technical support either, earning a score of 66.

Dana Friedman, CEO and president of Dragonfly Technologies, a solution provider based in New York, says she switched to WatchGuard's Firebox-X after Symantec dropped its security appliances. While she was happy with Symantec's products, she said the vendor's poor support hurt her business.

"What I like about [working with] WatchGuard is that they have a priority support line for the technician," she says. "Symantec makes everyone buy support."